Getting at a Entity internals

Unless I am being stupid, two things I would like to be able to do seem to be thwarted by a lack of the appropriate mesh query functions.

1) archive a mesh to .B3D complete with textures brushes etc. (actually having a command to do it would be better!)
2) replicate part of a mesh, again with textures etc.

The latter might be achieved by copying and then deleting the bits I don't want, but the former would appear to require intimate access to mesh data structures.

It would be useful to be able to extract texture and brush handles from meshes directly without having to manage the import and subsequent modification processes yourself.

Am I missing something? It's quite possible :-)

Aaah you want the easy way out....

You maybe right about the easy way (otherwise I would be using DX directly!), but what I really want to achieve are self-contained functions that don't rely on magic being performed elsewhere. That way code is easier to extend in the future.

Another similar problem I had recently was in implementing wireframe overlays of geometry which I do by holding two lists (types) of entities and calling RenderWorld twice with the alphas set to zero for those objects I don't want to render. The second RenderWorld is done in WireFrame with no z-buffering. The problem is that I have no way to query and restore the old entity alpha values, so I (or users of my code) have to track them (indeed I record the information in the display lists). This is not unusable, but rather clunky when all I need is the facility to query entity alpha.

I've only been using Blitz for a short while, so I may have missed any number of things. It would be great if I've missed something obvious here.

Steve.

Sadly, no fancy signature.